Analysis of Biofuels Indirect Land Use Effects Finds the Science Lacking: 'Too Diffuse and Subject To Too Many Arbitrary Assumptions To Be Useful for Rul...(e have developed a model for biofuels pr...)

Date:8/19/2009

e have developed a model for biofuels production and consumption in the U.S. that takes full life cycle analysis issues into consideration as well as some attention to land use changes. But the Argonne work does not extend to indirect land use changes, which are considered too uncertain to be modeled - and so it has come in for much criticism from Searchinger et al. as well as others.

"If you wished to put U.S. ethanol production in the worst possible light, assuming the worst possible set of production conditions guaranteed to give the worst possible set of indirect land use effects, then the assumptions would not be far from those actually presented in the Searchinger et al. paper," commented Dr. Hao Tan. "Frankly, better science upon which to base rule-making is available today."

The Mathews and Tan analysis identified six areas in which Searchinger et al. fell short:

• Direct plantings of biofuels crops around the world are ignored, and instead a spike in U.S. corn-based ethanol is considered a trigger;
• The U.S. spike is met exclusively by growing corn - but other ways of meeting the U.S. spike, all involving fewer GHG emissions, are ignored;
• The U.S. spike met entirely within the U.S. - without regard to trade (such as half of the spike being met by Brazilian sugarcane and imported into the U.S.);
• The Searchinger et al. calculations of carbon release are based on trends recorded in the 1990s but are projected forward up to 2016;
• Improvements in biomass yields around the world are not considered;
• The U.S. spike leads to indirect effects around the world without regard to regulatory limits (even in the U.S.).
  

"These six shortcomings, together with the fact that the paper is not replicable, since the models and parameters used are not accessible, places a qu
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SOURCE Professor John Mathews and Dr. Hao Tan Copyright©2009 PR Newswire. All rights reserved

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